Insights

China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and the European Patent Office (EPO) announced on 6 July 2026 that a new bilateral Patent Prosecution Highway pilot will begin on 1 August. Applicants will be able to rely on qualifying examination work from one office to seek accelerated treatment of a corresponding application before the other. The new route will operate alongside the existing IP5 PPH framework, under aligned eligibility conditions, with no fixed end date.

The bilateral channel gives applicants another practical option for coordinating parallel Chinese and European cases, but acceleration is not the same as easier examination. Claim correspondence, timing and the scope of the allowable subject matter will still determine whether a request is useful. Businesses should therefore review the two applications together before filing, including likely amendments, divisional strategy and response schedules. The procedural benefit will be greatest where the claim sets were drafted with cross-office consistency from the outset.

On 9 July 2026, India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and IP Australia signed an access agreement for the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) as part of the outcomes announced at the third India–Australia Annual Summit. Under the TKDL access framework, Australian patent examiners may use the database on a confidential basis for search and examination, drawing on a large body of documented traditional medicine formulations and related literature. IP Australia had already referred to TKDL as a non-patent literature resource in its examination guidance; the new agreement gives that access a clearer institutional footing.

The practical effect is likely to be felt most strongly in applications covering herbal extracts, biological formulations, combination therapies and derivative pharmaceutical uses. Examiners should be better placed to identify prior art that was previously dispersed across traditional medicine sources, making novelty, inventive step and claimed technical effects harder to establish. The legal patentability tests have not changed, but the evidence available to apply them has. Applicants should strengthen pre-filing traditional knowledge searches and provide more precise support for extraction methods, formulation ratios, unexpected effects and reproducible data; minor variations on known traditional formulations will face a more demanding examination record.

South Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP, formerly KIPO) announced on 29 June 2026 that it was reorganising and expanding its response to technology leakage, with the new structure taking effect on 30 June. A dedicated Technology Leakage Special Judicial Police Division will now handle trade secret theft and leakage involving strategic sectors such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors, separating those investigations from routine patent and design infringement work. The technology police workforce is being increased from 27 to 61, with specialist investigators, patent examiners, legal professionals and technical experts assigned more directly to complex cases.

A newly established IP Protection Analysis Division will use patent big data to identify higher-risk technologies and organisations and to turn unusual signals into investigative leads. MOIP is also standardising investigative procedures, including access to legal counsel, broader mandatory audio and video recording, and clearer case-progress notifications. The policy marks a shift from reactive enforcement toward data-led early warning and specialised investigation. Companies in AI, chips and other sensitive fields should still treat internal controls as the first line of defence, especially tiered access rights, logging, document classification and rigorous exit procedures for staff with access to core know-how.

From 1 July 2026, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) aims to issue a first office action within about six months for Patent Prosecution Highway requests filed on or after that date, down from roughly ten months for existing requests. As the new standard moves into operational use, PPH becomes more useful not only as an acceleration route but also as a planning tool for funding, product launches and parallel prosecution.

A related cost measure will run from 3 August 2026 to 31 December 2027: where a PPH request is filed together with a new request for a search and/or examination report, only 70% of the prevailing official fee will be payable. Faster handling does not relax the patentability standard. Applicants should still ensure that the Singapore claims sufficiently correspond to claims found allowable or patentable by the partner office and that the PPH request is filed before substantive examination begins. For well-prepared cases, the combination offers earlier feedback and a lower official cost for coordinated search and examination.

The UK Intellectual Property Office’s 2026–27 Corporate Plan places service transformation and AI copyright policy among its main delivery priorities. The official publication record shows that the plan was first published on 11 May 2026. With the patent side of One IPO moving into optimisation and legacy-system retirement, UKIPO plans to begin designing the trade mark service on the same shared technology base. It also acknowledges operational pressure: rising trade mark volumes have created backlogs in hearings and tribunals, while patent workloads remain affected by application growth and the system transition.

On policy, UKIPO will work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on the government’s next steps following the AI and copyright consultation, while also developing a strategy for its own use of AI. The practical message is not that a settled AI-copyright framework has already arrived. Rather, digital migration, backlog management and policy design will run in parallel. Trade mark applicants should build more time into filing and dispute schedules, while AI developers, platforms and rights holders should monitor the next measures on training-data transparency, licensing, technical standards and enforcement.

EUIPO reported on 7 July that it received 104,263 EU trade mark applications between January and June 2026, up 8.4% year on year, while EU design applications totalled 61,951, down about 1%. Combined filings reached 166,214, the Office’s highest first-half total on record. The increase was driven by trade marks rather than designs, but the design figure remains strong enough to show that demand for unitary EU protection is holding up.

The more practical change came with the design framework fully applicable from 1 July. EUIPO now accepts dynamic 3D representations in OBJ and STL formats and animated representations in MP4. One dynamic or animated file may be filed per design, with a 20 MB limit for the individual file and for the total attachments relating to each design, while the complete application may reach 1 GB; up to ten static JPEG views are also permitted. Multiple applications may contain up to 50 designs and additional designs are charged at a flat rate. This removes the old dependence on a small set of static views, but richer files do not automatically create broader protection. Applicants should test model integrity, representation consistency, H.264 encoding and the absence of an audio track before filing, because a technically sophisticated presentation can still produce an avoidable procedural defect.